


The Mercy Game

by Tridraconeus



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, Carrying, Gen, M/M, Severe Injury, Size Difference, Vomit, bear traps, heavyhanded animal metaphors, is mercy kink a kink because if it is i have it, mercy kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 19:51:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21185063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tridraconeus/pseuds/Tridraconeus
Summary: He learned how to place traps at the estate, where he hunted far less exciting game; foxes, coyotes, wolves. Now that he tracks the prey set loose for him, he knows that they’re not all that different in the end.





	The Mercy Game

**Author's Note:**

> i've never played dbd but when i see a dynamic like this i absolutely have to jump on it like a starving man

The damp, foggy air surrounding the estate clung to him. The estate was messy, now, a far cry from the sun and steel of its heyday. Trapper barely remembered it; he held onto the faint, fuzzy memory as best as he could. 

He does remember the places he wandered when he was younger, following pawprints in the forested area outside the main buildings. It’s where he’d been put to do his business this trial. 

It was a good feeling, to be home, even studded with rusty hooks and other things he didn’t recognize. He set down traps and listened for the telltale sounds of scurrying feet and lone fearful breathing.

He’d let a fox go, once. He didn’t think of himself as merciful. The beast was gnawing at its own leg in desperation, and he felt— not pitying. He didn’t pity the fox’s urge to live. He wanted to reward it, even if that meant it would grow up wily and cautious, and teach its children to avoid waiting metal jaws. 

Dwight wasn’t a fox. He wasn’t even a rabbit, really, but Trapper felt the same tug of pride and interest as he had watching the fox struggle to free itself. Dwight’s hands were slick with his own blood and he wasn’t strong enough to pry open the jaws. His fellow survivors were all hooked and dead shortly after not too long ago. No teamwork, this time. Angry at each other. A pack with no howl is no pack at all. 

He’d reached down to free the fox and it bit him viciously around the wrist. It couldn’t get to him past his gloves, but it bit down as strongly as it could, even when he pried the trap open and let it jerk its leg out. Even then, it didn’t let go until he shook it, cuffed it on the head to dislodge its teeth. 

Dwight didn’t snarl or bare his teeth. He was sniveling, keening, crying. His face was a mess of blood and tears. His whole body was disgustingly rent, clothes soaked in mud and blood and bile. Trapper smelled vomit. He trembled as Trapper walked closer. 

He went slower, just to see what he’d do, and Dwight didn’t disappoint. He couldn’t go anywhere. Not really, not with the trap. It anchored him on his knees. If he tried to stand, a sudden rush of unnatural, punitive pain would drop him back down. 

It didn’t keep him from crawling, at least at first, but he got about a yard— Trapper following along, closing the distance a little bit more with every step— before he suddenly cried out again. 

A new rule to the game. He didn’t know about it until he broke it.

Those were Trapper’s favorite kinds of rules. 

Dwight twisted to look at Trapper. His glasses were askew and his eyes were shadowed with terror. What scared him more, Trapper wondered. The hook? The Entity? The pain of the trap? Trapper himself? There was so much to fear. He tried, though, over and over again. 

Trapper drew closer. Dwight made a whimpering, crying sound and held both hands in front of his face like that would do anything. 

He expected a blow, or to be hoisted over Trapper’s shoulder and ferried to a hook, how these things usually went. Trapper did want to hook him. He wanted to see him squirm and writhe until all the fight left him. His body would disappear, but the blood he’d shed would stay on the basement floor for much longer. 

Next trial. This trial, an urge stronger than the hook tugged at him.

He advanced again and Dwight actually cried out. Caught between the inevitable pain of the Trapper’s attentions and the immediate pain of moving with the trap on him, he shied from what was closest and stayed tense and frozen. 

Trapper made a shushing sound, a little shh, shh that made Dwight moan in confusion and pain. Trapper gave him a moment, and when the whimpers did not cease, shushed him again. Obediently, Dwight quieted.

Trapper knelt, slowly, like Dwight was the fox and he was trying not to scare him. Pointless. Dwight was born scared, and he’d die scared too, but not this trial. 

He reached for the jaws of the trap, anticipating the soft moan of fear and shushing Dwight before he could make it. 

It still came out, but quieter, and Dwight spent the next few seconds biting back keens and moans as the jaws were wrested from his leg. He could probably wrap his hand around Dwight’s ankle and have space to spare. The trap itself had nearly severed him at the ankle. The trap was dissembled with utmost care and tucked into a cloth bag. 

Dwight stayed quiet then. Trapper surveyed the tears still streaming down his face— clean tracks in the blood and mud— and stood. 

The hatch was only a few meters away. Not a bad walk, not by far, and it passed a few hooks in case he decided his time would be better spent watching Dwight pitch and scream. 

Dwight yelped and shied away as Trapper bent down to sling him over his shoulder. The familiar position usually prompted him to wiggle madly in an attempt to slide down and free himself, but Trapper imagined he was disoriented, what with the shushing and the removal of the trap. The journey was uneventful. Dwight didn’t struggle at all. He was weeping quietly. He had no chance of freeing himself from Trapper’s grasp; had even less chance of freeing himself from the cruel basement hooks that Trapper favored, and even if he did manage to free himself he wouldn’t be able to go much of anywhere on his mangled leg, and that would only prompt Trapper to draw it out even more-- which he was usually happy to do. He thought he’d be hooked and left there to hang and scream and bleed until the Entity inevitably returned him to the meager campfire. 

Then he would be taken again, and caught again, and hooked to hang and scream and bleed, unless he managed to escape. 

Trapper was familiar with the cycle. He wasn’t always the one, and Dwight wasn’t always in  _ his _ Realm, so it was a pleasantly ever-changing yet static series of events. 

They were coming up on the hatch. Dwight, draped over his shoulder, couldn’t see it. He was still crying. His shoulders jerked every now and then— Trapper could feel his belly contract, his chest jolt. _ Alive.  _

He bent to slough Dwight off of him, dropping him right in front of the hatch. 

The power trip felt kind of nice too, he had to admit to himself, watching warring emotions play out in Dwight’s eyes and across his bloody, tearstained face. Grateful. Terrified. Curious? Fear, again, and urgency as he broke out of not-quite shock and not-quite panic. When Trapper didn’t bring down his weapon or slam the hatch shut, or grab him again to teach him a lesson in the futility of trying to escape, he wasted no time in disappearing down the hatch. 

Trapper watched him go. 

It hadn’t been mercy that he’d shown the small, scared man; not respect; he couldn’t place it. 

Dwight would die in the next trial. Trapper knew that already. First, last, or second or third, he’d die. 

But in this one, he lived.

Trapper expected the Entity to be furious that Trapper had denied it its meal, but when he reappeared in what he knew now was his area and reached out into the fog to feel for an evaluation, he found none of the disappointment or irritation he anticipated.

He found curiosity. He found wicked, detached pleasure at the whole situation. He found the urge to do it again unsmothered, a smaller smoldering ember next to the greater urge to see the bodies hooked. 

In the distance, he saw Dwight crouched by the campfire with Claudette leaning over him. It only took one bad trial to remind them of the stakes; Trapper wouldn’t have such an easy time of it next trial.

They’d fall apart again. They always did.

When they did, he’d be waiting. 

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wanted to spin this into a ship but there's no way to do that without noncon/dubcon undertones so I'm not doing that  
Feel free to leave a kudos or a comment if you enjoyed! Comments make my day.


End file.
